by Ralph Cotton
“I’m most obliged to you for the coffee and the food,” Sam said, standing in a crouch inside the small tent. “Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I best get myself some rest.”
The two men said their good nights and watched the Ranger turn and walk out into the wind and rain.
“Did I say something wrong?” Ailes whispered as lightning twisted and curled ahead of a loud clap of thunder.
“I don’t think so,” said Colson. “I think he’s just got a lot on his mind—one of them driven men that won’t rest easy until something’s done and over with.”
“Should I get on up an hour before daylight, help him with that body?” Ailes asked.
“He won’t be here,” Colson said in an assured tone. “He’ll be up and gone before midnight, I’d bet on it.”
“A strange fellow,” Ailes said in a lowered tone, staring at the tent fly. “You never know what’s going to blow in off these badlands.”
• • •
Late in the night, when the new round of storms had come and gone, Sam unrolled himself from beneath the wagon’s tarpaulin and stood up in the cold aftermath of drizzling rain. As he walked to where the horses stood huddled together under the big pine, a lantern came on inside the tent and Odell Colson stepped out and held the lantern above them as the Ranger readied the roan and the dead man’s horse for the trail.
“I hate seeing a man take out in weather like this,” Colson said, bunching his slicker at his throat. He watched the Ranger step up into the saddle while silver rain angled sidelong in the lantern’s glow.
“Obliged for your help and hospitality,” Sam replied, drawing his wet coat collar up against his neck. The roan grumbled and chuffed at him as he turned it and nudged it forward, the dead man’s bay huddled close to its side. “You’ll feel better once we’re moving,” he murmured down to the testy roan.
After a few hundred yards of splashing mud and cold rain, the horse settled in under him in the moonless darkness and he didn’t stop his two-horse contingent until a gray misty light shone long and low on the eastern hill line.
When daylight found him, he stood on the side of a rocky hill in the cold drizzle scraping out the thinnest of graves with an edged stone. As a renewed wind rose and rippled across stretches of shallow lakes of gray floodwater below, he rolled wet stone after wet rock atop the canvas-wrapped corpse until he convinced himself that any wolf or coyote strong enough to unearth the miserable sack of flesh and bone would be welcome to it.
Before stepping back atop the roan, he took off his soggy hat, folded his muddy hands at his waist and looked down at the mound of rock out of habit, even as he reminded himself that he felt no compulsion to speak on behalf of the sorely interred. That wasn’t his job. Even so . . .
“I saw him kill you,” he said grudgingly. “You hadn’t done anything that I could see.” He drew up in the swallow-tailed coat and glanced around the cold, wet and darkening flood lands. “Anyway, I’m not sticking any more of your kind in the ground—not in this weather.”
He eyed a lone coyote who sat in the rain atop a cliff watching him as he swung up into his saddle and put the roan forward at a walk, the bay moving along beside him. Amen, he said to himself in afterthought, looking back at the nameless pile of rock. Turning forward in his saddle, he took the two horses down to the edge of the shallow floodwater and rode on until the wind and rain grew fierce once again and the day blackened around him.
“Looks like a little more rain,” he said wryly down to the roan. The roan chuffed and swung its head as if it understood him and took no solace in his words.
He stopped again two hours later when a new storm pounded in and forced him and the horses to take shelter inside a crumbling three-sided adobe. The abandoned timber and adobe house sat half-roofed, elevated on an island only a few feet higher than the floodwater surrounding it. Sam walked inside slowly, leading both horses behind him. As soon as he crossed a threshold of water and mud, he saw a spindly-legged paint horse staring at him from across a muddy floor.
Turning quickly, rifle in hand, he saw a wounded Mexican lying on a pile of rubble, staring dazed at him through a curtain of blood running down his forehead, soaking into a cloth headband. His chest and shoulders were covered with black, dried blood. A big Colt weaved back and forth in his weak bloody hand.
“Drop your gun, hombre,” the Mexican said in a raspy, broken voice.
Sam’s thumb slid over his rifle hammer and cocked it.
“Drop yours first,” he replied. “It looks like you’ve gone as far as you’re going.”
“I—I think . . . you are right,” he said, relenting. His gun hand slumped down at his side. “You can go on . . . and shoot me. I don’t mind. You’re too late to kill me.”
The Mexican saw the badge on Sam’s chest behind his open swallow-tailed coat.
“What? You are a lawman?” he asked.
“Arizona Territory Ranger Samuel Burrack,” Sam said, stooping down beside him. “I didn’t come to kill you.” He picked up the Colt and uncocked it.
“I am Haco Suarez. I am a . . . bounty hunter.” He corrected himself, saying bitterly, “That is, I was . . . until I was shot in my head and my belly . . . by one of my own compañeros. By mistake, of course.” He looked around, blood running down from his headband into his eyes. “Now I die here.” He tried to make the sign of the cross on his chest, but he was so weak the Ranger had to take his bloody hand and help him complete the gesture.
Outside, wind howled. Lightning streaked.
“What were you and your compañeros doing?” Sam asked, picking up the headband just enough to see the gaping bullet hole. Dark blood surged with each beat of the man’s heart.
Thunder exploded.
“We come to kill . . . a very dangerous man,” he said. “Only I think we kill . . . each other instead.”
“Who is this dangerous man?” the Ranger asked, his interest growing.
“Wilson Orez,” the man said in a waning breath.
“Where was he? When did it happen?” Sam asked, getting even more interested.
“Only today . . . him and three . . . of his men. At the old fortaleza, the Apache Matanza Motivo,” the Mexican said.
“Four of them, at the Killing Grounds Fortress,” Sam repeated in English, familiar with the old Spanish fortress where the Apache had once slaughtered hundreds of Spanish conquistadors by hanging them upside down over fires and boiling their brains inside their skulls.
“Sí, the Killing Grounds. And so it was for me. . . .” The Mexican tried a weak smile. Sam looked at the battered Colt, and at the bandolier of ammunition around the Mexican’s shoulder. He knew the wounded man was dying; he’d be dead any minute now. Sam knew he was taking the big Colt with him when he left.
As if reading the Ranger’s mind, the Mexican said, “The gun is yours, Ranger . . . take it. So is the horse.” He looked at the Ranger’s coat and footwear. Even in his final moments he had to stifle a weak laugh. “I only wish to God my clothes fit you. . . .” His words fell away.
Sam stood up when he saw the last breath come out of the man’s chest.
“Gracias,” he said quietly to glazed-over eyes. He reached down, pulled the bandolier off Haco’s shoulder and slipped it over his own.
“The Killing Grounds,” he said aloud, adjusting the bandolier over his right shoulder and shoving the Colt down in his empty holster. He looked down at Haco Suarez’s boots, gauging their size. But then he thought better of taking them and looked away, out the open doorway through the pouring windblown rain. He was getting closer every mile he pushed through.
I’m coming, Orez, he said to himself.
Lightning snaked down and twisted on the black horizon as if in reply.
Chapter 12
After the Ranger had wrapped the Mexican in a soaked blanket he unrolled from behind the pa
int’s saddle, he leaned the body back in place against the wall. While the brunt of the passing storm raged and howled beyond the adobe walls, inside, for the lack of a chair or dry place to sit, he leaned against the dusty stone face of a hearth and inspected the big Colt. He took the gun apart, rubbed each part clean with his thumb, reassembled it and rolled the cylinder one click at a time, holding it close to his ear, gauging the merit of the gun’s crafting.
Satisfied with the precision and the voice of the gun’s metal, he reloaded the big revolver, slipped it down into his wet holster and stepped over to the three horses, the Mexican’s paint horse shied away from the other two as if uninvited.
“Come on in,” Sam said wryly to the paint, picking up its dangling reins and ushering it over beside the two muddy wet horses. “We’re all friends here.”
When he saw the storm waning and moving away moments later, he gathered the three horses’ reins and led them out into the mud outside the adobe. With the paint’s and the bay’s reins in hand, he stepped atop the roan and rode out at a walk, rain jumping like a field of crickets on the broad surface of muddy floodwater.
He’d realized how fortunate he’d been to come across the dying Mexican and hearing about Orez holing up at the old fortress. He would have liked to hear more, but the Mexican bounty hunter had given him all he could before slipping away. Anyway, he thought, the horses stepping up onto the lower edge of a long rounding hillside, he wasn’t riding into four guns unaware, they with the cover of a fortress around them.
At the end of a wet two-hour ride, as the rain slackened and the wind and lightning fell away in the distance, he stopped the horses on a thin muddy trail and looked at the old Killing Grounds Fortress through a silver-gray mist. The old adobe fortress stood alone, surrounded by foundations and crumbled remnants of other buildings from the old, walled Spanish compound. The wall itself had been toppled and pulled down by a hundred years of bands of passing desert warriors.
Knowing himself and the horses to be partly obscured by the looming mist, Sam stepped down from his saddle a good distance back. He kept the barn between him and his horses and the front door and window gun ports of the old adobe. Watchfully he led the three horses through the foggy veil in a wide half circle around the large adobe building and to the rear of the ancient timber and adobe barn. Even as he walked along in the mud, rifle in hand, he saw the bodies of two men lying facedown on the ground beside a broken-down wagon, thirty yards from the adobe’s front door.
At the rear of the barn, he shoved the door open and glanced around in the shadowy empty gloom. He looked down at a path of overlapping hoofprints in the mud, all leading out to the rear door. He led the three horses inside and left the door open behind him. In the sparse gray light the open door provided him, he saw the body of a man leaning sprawled back against one of the barn’s support timbers. The man’s dead eyes stared straight ahead, a peaceful expression coming through the mask of deep gaping knife slashes that covered his face and chest.
Walking closer, the Ranger saw the man’s scalp had been sliced from the top of his head and lay on the muddy floor beside him. The corpse’s shirt had been stripped away, exposing a bullet wound in his shoulder. His torso had been split and lay hanging open from his breastplate to his crotch. Sam only looked at the maimed corpse for a long moment, inspecting it closely before averting his eyes and looking away. He noted that for all the cutting and stabbing the man had endured, his hands and wrists carried no wounds that a man would receive in defending his life. Easy enough, he told himself. The man had already been dead, just like the two he’d seen Orez kill.
Why, Orez? he asked himself. “Who do you think is following you? Who is all this for?”
He looked at the man’s hands and bare feet, all split cleanly and severely straight up between the tendons, in the same manner as the dead man he’d found tied down across the bay’s saddle. On the muddy ground beside the man’s blue ivory feet stood a pair of boots, as if they had been left for him. But Sam refused the boots, took the dead man by his wrists and dragged him away inside a stall and covered him with loose straw.
“It’s all I’ve got for you,” he said quietly, stepping back out of the stall.
He gathered the three horses and walked out through the front door. In a wind lull, rain falling straight and steadily from a blackish sky, he kept a close watch on the old adobe’s door and windows. Watching for any movement through the gun ports, he stepped behind the cover of the broken-down wagon, walked to the first corpse lying facedown in the mud and rolled it over. In a stark flicker of lightning, he saw blood-traced water run from the corpse’s lipless mouth. In the mud beside the corpse, he saw two globs of gray muddy flesh, one wearing the mantle of a walrus mustache.
In this dead man’s face he saw agony, terror. This one, he deduced, had been alive through most, if not all, of what Wilson Orez had inflicted upon him. This one’s hands had been split, but not his feet. This corpse had three bullet holes in his chest. A rifle lay in the mud nearby; a Colt stood muddy and unused in his holster. Sam took it and shoved it down in the long deep pocket of his swallow-tailed coat. He stopped for a second and looked at all the material things the dead had divested themselves of.
He found it ironic, he thought, sloshing on through the mud, the horses right behind him. This harsh flood-swollen land that had previously denied him everything now lay rife and ready to fill his immediate needs—rain slickers, boots, guns, hats. All these things lay loosely on, or strewn near, the dead as if cast suddenly aside by souls who’d left in hurry.
All yours for the pickings . . . , he told himself grimly. All it took was for men to die.
Without the wagon for cover, he sloshed past the next corpse and on to the adobe, walking between the horses until he stood in the mud and water outside the front door. His hand didn’t ease in the least on the rifle when he saw the door standing ajar. But he did allow himself to draw an easier breath when he shoved the big door open, looked around inside and saw the body lying at the open door to another room.
Leading the horses inside, he dropped their reins, crossed the muddy floor and looked down at the body as he stepped over it and into the other room. The wet muddy horses stood midfloor nuzzling each other. This was one of Orez’s men, Sam concluded, seeing none of Orez’s knife mutilation on the corpse, only the gruesome wounds of countless gunshots the corpse had no doubt received while lying in the line of fire.
He looked around the room and went to the pallet of straw in the corner. Outside, thunder grumbled behind a harsh stab of orange-white lightning. He stooped beside the pallet and looked it over good, noting two indentations in the blanket. He picked up a short three-inch piece of dark thread that appeared to have fallen from an article of clothing. A man and a woman here? he asked himself, studying the thread. Then he noted how close the indentations were in the pallet—almost one, he told himself.
Beside the pallet he saw part of a small footprint in the soft earth before the surrounding ground turned into mud. A woman’s footprint, he was certain. Was it left there deliberately to be seen, to be found by someone like him? he wondered.
All right. He stood, looked around the room, out the open rear window. There had been people waiting here for Orez to arrive. One of them a woman, he surmised. Turning, he walked out of the room and to the hearth, stooped and laid his hand down above the ashes.
Cold.
But they wouldn’t be for long, he told himself, eyeing the dry wood in a pile beside the hearth. He looked around and saw no sign of food supplies. But with the afternoon encroaching and no permanent letup in the storms, he would build a fire and warm and dry himself if nothing else, he decided. He stood again and looked at the wet, miserable horses.
“I’ll check the barn for some grain or hay,” he said aloud. The horses’ ears pricked at his voice, then relaxed as their muzzles probed the damp air. He had started to turn and leave when
his eyes caught something he had missed before. On the lower wall by the door where the dead man lay, he saw one word smeared in blood. Walking closer, he stopped to read the word aloud.
“Ayuda,” he whispered, knowing it was the Spanish word for help.
He turned his eyes back to the other room, to the pallet on the muddy floor. After a moment of consideration, he raised each of the dead man’s hands and studied the tips of his fingers. The dead man was not a Mexican. Why would he ask for help in Spanish—or at all?—he asked himself, finding no coating of blood on the man’s fingertips from writing the word.
This changed things, he told himself. He stood up and looked at the firewood and let out a breath of regret.
“Come on, fellows,” he said to the three horses, walking over and gathering their reins. “No time to dry out. We’ll rummage the barn and get you fed. Then we’re back on their trail.”
What trail? a voice asked inside his head. But he ignored the voice, turned the horses and led them back toward the ancient barn. He thought about the plea for help smeared in blood as he and the horses splashed through the mud in the pouring rain. There was a trail, and he would find it, he told himself with determination. This was the job at hand.
On the side of a rocky hill beneath a narrow cliff overhang, Freeman Manning huddled out of the rain as braided streams of muddy water ran on either side of them into a stream of floodwater below. Hardin, after relieving himself against the wall beneath the overhang, stepped over and stooped back down beside him. Rosa Dulce sat fifteen feet away in a drier spot where the overhang sank back a little farther into the hillside. She squatted on her haunches, Rudy Roach’s rain slicker wrapped around her and held closed at the throat. Her free hand idly picked at loose pieces of thread at the muddy hem of her skirt. Rudy’s slouch hat lay limp and dripping, pulled down over her head. Ten yards ahead of them, Wilson Orez stood straight and tall on the hill point, looking off through the rain in the direction of the border.